NWI DSA March-April 2025 Recap

Hello comrades! It’s Jackie, your friendly neighborhood Membership Coordinator- here to present the March-April 2025 recap for our chapter. Since March was a quieter time for us as a chapter, we opted to combine it with April.

Chapter Announcements

• The chapter Steering Committee has multiple openings due to members in the process of moving or stepping down. We encourage comrades of all experience levels to help lead your local DSA! Email us at northwest.indiana.dsa@gmail.com if interested.
• Next General Meeting for the chapter will be on June 12th, 6PM-7:30PM CST, Valparaiso Public Library.
  

Campaigns and Events

March was a quieter month for us here at NWI DSA, though that’s not to say it was a quiet month for Northwest Indiana! Headed up by the local student-ran nonprofit Hispanic Student Association, a coalition protest between them and NWI DSA, BLM Gary, Just Transition NWI, Students for Justice In Palestine PNW, and AFT Indiana took place in Highland. As the original Instagram post notes, this coalition represents solidarity on key issues troubling the people of Northwest Indiana, including immigration, healthcare, environmental justice, and more.

The protest had an estimated attendance of around 30 people, and featured speakers from some of the attending groups. We are elated to see the growth of organized action HSA is helping to build, particularly considering the young age of its organizers! We stand in solidarity with the organized left of Northwest Indiana and continue to work on fostering connections with the rest of our community. 

In other news, on April 17th we hosted our first Socialism 101 educational event! 

This event focused on teaching basic concepts of what terms like capitalism, socialism and materialism really mean from a Marxist perspective. As socialists we understand that capitalism has inherent contradictions that cannot simply be resolved via reform. We understand organizing for reform, electoral struggle, and more as pieces of a greater puzzle, and that in order to truly address the issues of capitalism we must ultimately replace it with socialism. We believe that socialist education is extremely important in this task, as it gives us context and a coherent framework to work off of, making organizing efforts more focused and effective. We cannot reasonably expect to affect change without first understanding what we want, why things are the way they are now, and analyzing what we can learn from both successful and unsuccessful attempts of the past. We thank the comrades and the curious folks who attended this meeting, and look forward to seeing more folks and more events like this in the future!

Notable Internal Developments

We’re ecstatic to have established the Red Reading Group by NWI DSA, which met for the first time on May 14th, 8PM.

We chose our first text, Karl Marx’s Value, Price and Profit at our April General Meeting, due to it being a popular recommendation as an introductory Marxist text. It’s a fairly short pamphlet, where Marx delves into some concepts about where value comes from (spoiler: it’s labor), and argues against the beliefs of some of his contemporaries that struggle over wages would simply result in equal movement compensating for it elsewhere in the workforce. In other words, Marx is arguing against talking points that we still encounter today, that a raise for one group of workers necessarily means a pay cut for other workers, or just results in an equal raise in cost. Capitalists extract profit from the difference between the value worker labor creates, and the substantially smaller value the workers are actually compensated for. This difference can and should be struggled against. We can see real world results of wage struggle, for example comparing the ratio between CEO pay and worker pay in different companies, countries, etc. Of course, we must understand that even if won these reforms are ultimately only temporary and are always being fought against by the owning classes, however despite this they are indeed tangible struggles that affect real improvement in the lives of workers. We must not only fight for change within the system, but fight for the ability to change out of it!

Other Local Action

NWI DSA member Michael H recently attended his first Porter County Council meeting, on April 22nd. Shared below are his thoughts:

Here are some observations from the April 22nd Porter County Council Meeting. For the most part it seemed to be pretty standard administrative stuff. There was a long and detailed presentation about the DLZ corporation’s renovation which did get a lot of scrutiny from the board for which the company was well prepared. One particularly amusing moment occurred when a board member questioned whether they could use more durable material in padded cells so that inmates couldn’t damage them as easily. They were told that would defeat the entire purpose of the cells. It seems like a silly question, but I guess you have to ask these things just in case. The requested funds were approved unanimously. Porter County Parks and Recreation also had all their substantial requests passed unanimously and weren’t grilled nearly as much about the price tag despite asking for amounts in excess of 100 thousand dollars. There were also assorted smaller requests of a few hundred dollars which also didn’t get much pushback.

What I found most interesting is how much scrutiny requests of a few thousand dollars got from the council, especially if those requests were for things like training or raises for staff. That was when council members remembered that things like SB1, tariffs, and federal budgets are going to start affecting them. Right now it seems that they prefer cutting budgets to raising taxes, and the focus seems to be on things that aren’t going to be as immediately obvious to voters for the moment.